John Carroll (author)

John Carroll (born 1944) is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at La Trobe University in Melbourne Australia. He is the author of Puritan, Paranoid, Remissive, Guilt, Ego and Soul, Humanism: The Rebirth and Wreck of Western Culture, and Intruders In The Bush: The Australian Quest For Identity. His Cambridge doctoral dissertation on epistemological anarchistic and anti-rationalist themes in Max Stirner, Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky was published as Breakout from the Crystal Palace (1974). It was supervised by George Steiner. Puritan, Paranoid, Remissive (1977) echoed and developed upon themes in Philip Rieff's Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (1966).

Humanism (1993; 2010) is Carroll's most ambitious work to date. Predicated on the view that Western high culture is in a declining if not nihilistic mode, Humanism traces this decline to an epistemic tyranny of reason and its subjection of other forms of knowing and understanding being. Carroll's often bleak diagnosis is primarily based on unique readings of canonic theological, philosophical and artistic texts including those by Sophocles, Calvin, Holbein, Donatello, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Poussin, Henry James and John Ford. The heart of the book's analysis is highly indebted to Nietzsche's critique of "Socratic" culture in The Birth of Tragedy. Terror: a Meditation on the Meaning of September 11 (2004) is an application of many of the themes in the former work.

In The Western Dreaming and The Existential Jesus, Carroll rereads Gospel narratives and the ontology of Christ through a Heideggerian and non-theistic lens. His most recent work, Greek Pilgrimage, is an unabashed hellenophilic meditation on the nature of ancient Greek aesthetics and culture and what remains of the archaeological sites themselves. His forthcoming book, Land of the Golden Cities, is expected to be published late in 2016.

Bibliography

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Books

  • Break-out from the Crystal Palace : the anarcho-psychological critique : Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1974.
  • Puritan, paranoid, remissive : a sociology of modern culture. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1977.
  • Guilt : the grey eminence behind character, history, and culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1985.
  • Intruders in the bush : the Australian quest for identity (2nd ed.). Melbourne: Oxford University Press. 1992.

Articles

  • "Visiting Yuendumu : a personal memoir of an Aboriginal community". Quadrant. 39 (10): 19–22. Oct 1995.
  • "[Reply to letter from Yuendumu Community Government Council]". Letters. Quadrant. 40 (1–2): 3. Jan–Feb 1996.
  • "Male and female – a timeless discord : Poussin's Orpheus and Eurydice". Art. Quadrant. 40 (3): 46–51. Mar 1996.
  • "The tragic view". Letters. Quadrant. 40 (5): 6. May 1996.
  • John Carroll's website
  • Carroll on Philip Rieff
  • Carroll discusses the re-release of Humanism in 2004
  • Carroll discussing The Existential Jesus
  • Review of Existential Jesus


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